As we begin to debate the possibility, a department of justice criminal investigation may be warranted in respect to the conduct and actions of George W. Bush and senior members of his administration. To my thinking the abuse, torture and killing of children seem to stand out as the most morally repugnant allegations, and as fate would have it, they seem be the charges for which we have the best evidence to indict and obtain conviction.

A topic more or less ignored by the main stream media during the course of the war on terror, Few Americans are even aware President Bush authorized rendition and detentions of children as enemy combatants. We even have documented incidents when they were simply young family members of high profile terror suspects and the want was to use the children as leverage to obtain cooperation, information and confessions.
The mind bending numbers were supplied by the Bush administration itself to the United Nations in 2008 to counter claims of even higher estimates, Some NGO’s and human rights groups were saying the United States was responsible for the detention and disappearance of ten thousand children in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The folks at the white house assured the United Nations the figure was more in the 2,500 range and it could account for most of them, paper work gets lost sometimes I guess, but they were sticking by the twenty five hundred figure come hell or high water.

In an episode right out of the popular but fictional series 24, Jack Bauer snatches a couple kids to obtain information from a terrorist, George Bush wasn’t pretending, he really did order his people to encourage Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s cooperation and confession by “detaining and interrogating” the terrorists two children ages 7 and 9, of course, George Bush still insists the lawyers at Justice told him everything he did was legal and no one was ever tortured on his watch. I speculate even Americans who are comfortable with the torture of suspected terrorists to gain information do not support the use of it on children.
In Afghanistan alone 800 boys, between the ages of 10 and 15 felt to differing degree the embrace of vice president Cheney’s enhanced interrogation policy. Reliable reports tell us 64 children were sent to Guantánamo bay, some may still be there, of course after six or seven years they are not children anymore are they.
We can all agree Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a terrorist, but how George Bush and Dick Cheney ever arrived at a reality that made them think they could possibly convince a jury of their peers, they were justified in the abuse of the man’s children is something I lack the intellect to wrap my mind around.

Most Americans have yet to see the “special” videos form Abu Ghraib, the ones that show American guards and a girl of 12 or 13 screaming in vain for her brother held in another cell to help her while she is stripped naked and beaten.
The Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al reports he witnessed a very ill 15-year-old forced to run up and down the slabs at Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water, beaten whenever he stopped. Stripped naked and doused with cold water when he collapsed.

And then we have the case of General Hamid Zabar another recipient of vice president Cheney’s want to encourage cooperation and confession through the implementation of “enhanced interrogations” They decided the most effective technique was to order the arrest of his 16-year-old son, Soldiers were dispatched to find the boy, he was stripped naked, and after drenching him with mud and water, drove him around in the open back of a truck in the cold of the January night. Then they brought him naked and on the verge of death to his father to encourage cooperation and confession.

One wonders, how exactly members of the Bush administration intend to defend against incontrovertible evidence of children coerced into confessions, denied access to lawyers while exculpatory evidence was suppressed should they themselves ever be brought to trial, Open courts that adhere to the rule of law, where they will enjoy the very rights they denied so many others.

In his exit interviews George W. Bush was never asked about the rendition, detention and abuse of children in American-run prisons in the “war on terror.” It seems time we begin to question, investigate and hold accountable those who are arguably responsible for the most egregious type of war crimes the civilized world has on the books, the abuse and death of children, Youngsters who should never have been detained in the first place.

That’s my view, yours may be different

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